Meiji at 150 Digital Teaching Resource Launch



The Centre for Japanese Research and UBC Library at the University of British Columbia are proud to announce the launch of the Meiji at 150 Digital Teaching Resource(DTR).  Curated and edited by Tristan Grunow and Naoko Kato, the Meiji at 150 DTR presents open-source scholarly content that will be useful for educators and academics looking for new images and topics to introduce into their classroom teaching, while highlighting the academic research made possible using UBC Library’s digital archives.

Along with collating numerous Digital Resources documenting the early modern and modern eras, the Meiji at 150 DTR features over a dozen Visual Essays by prominent scholars of Japanese history, literature, and culture, pairing digital images and analysis to re-visualize cartography, political turmoil, and natural disasters in the late-Tokugawa period; urban change and architecture in Meiji Tokyo; poetry, fashion, and photography; and the history of Japanese overseas migration and the prewar Japanese-Canadian community in Vancouver.  These essays are also available in open-source e-textbook form as Digital Meijis: Revisualizing Modern Japanese History at 150 through the BCcampus platform.  The Meiji at 150 Digital Teaching Resource is one aspect of the UBC Meiji at 150 Project, comprised of a lecture seriesworkshop series, and ongoing podcast series. See our website for more details, to access video and audio recordings of past events, or to listen to podcast interviews with leading scholars of Japanese history, literature, art, and culture. See below for the list of contents:

  1. Naoko Kato, “Re-viewing Meiji via Japanese-Canadian Connections”
  2. Radu Leca, “Competing Views of the World in Early Modern Japan”
  3. M. William Steele, “Apocalypse Now: An Alternate View of the Bakumatsu Years”
  4. Gregory Smits, “The Ansei Edo Earthquake and Catfish Prints”
  5. Masataka Kanaya, “Reading Edo Urban Space in the Tōkyō Gōshō Sugoroku (Tokyo Rich Merchants Board Game)”
  6. Tristan R. Grunow, “Ginza Bricktown and the Myth of Meiji Modernization”
  7. Benjamin Bryce, “J. Cooper Robinson: A Canadian Missionary and Photographer in Japan, 1888-1925”
  8. Allen Hockley, “John Cooper Robinson and Japanese Commercial Photography”
  9. Joshua S. Mostow, “The One Hundred Poets in the Meiji Period”
  10. Miriam Wattles, “Meiji Daughters: Their Stuff and Fancy in Brocade Pictures, 1870s-1880s”
  11. Ayaka Yoshimuzu, “A Glimpse of Meiji Kimono Fashion”
  12. Yukari Takai, “Via Hawai‘i: The Transmigration of Japanese”
  13. Eiji Okawa, “Japanese Culture and Language in the Prewar Canadian ‘Mosaic’”
  14. Eiji Okawa, “Associational Lives of Women in the Prewar Japanese-Canadian Community”
  15. Ayaka Yoshimize, “‘Exploring the Devil Caves’: Brothels, Sex Workers, and the Disciplining of Women’s Bodies in the Tairiku Nippō (1908-1920)”


TAGGED WITH